At the time of launching a brand new digital project, it is necessary to have a frequent connection between the engineers and the business team. This is important to make efficient use of time, effort, and resources.
However, one thing that can certainly help is following the right strategy to achieve your objectives. By improving communication between the two professionals, the progress of the project can be prevented from any kind of barriers or bottlenecks.
This is where BDD (behavior-driven development) plays its part. It helps an organization successfully assist its technical team to deliver the software project within the required time frame without getting into much hassle.
What Is BDD ( Behavior Driven Development)?
BDD basically stands for Behavior Driven Development, which is a high-level software project methodology. It uses the outside-in technique in which first we figure out the outside layer that defines the needs of a business.
The most important part of the project is the development phase. BDD is a technique that enables you to make the process easier by breaking up the project into smaller tasks and then concluding with solutions.
Development is a pretty challenging and complicated phase of a project, and resultantly many teams tend to miss the key elements. This vital element of the development process is to fulfill the specific requirements of a business.
To overcome these problems, top software development companies start their development project with a defined approach. The main goals and power of the software development cycle are based on a progressive and defined approach.
How Does Bdd Work
The first step in BDD software testing is to convert the given idea into a list of requirements between the outside and inside layers. Moreover, one crucial fact that is essential to remember while listing the requirements is that it should be so that everyone understands it.
And then, the cycle moves to its next steps. It includes figuring out the requirements and features and fulfilling the given standards to release the final product. What does a company expect to benefit from BDD? Teams who are already using TDD and ATDD consider BDD to drive several benefits.
They expect BDD to offer practical guidance on organizing the communication between different teams of developers, testers, and domain experts. Besides effective communication, tools targeting a BDD approach should automatically generate technical information.
To ensure that every team member gets the point, we accomplish flexibility with a story-driven implementation. This story will act as a natural language that everyone understands and clearly describes the desired outcome.
BDD Vs. TDD Vs. ATDD
| Parameters | BDD | TDD | ATDD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Definition | A developmental approach that mainly focuses on the behaviors of the system. | A developmental approach that primarily focuses on the implementation of software features | A technique that is used to focus on defining the most accurate requirements. |
| Participants | Developers, QAs, and Customers | Developers | Developers, QAs, and Customers |
| Language | Simple and understandable native language | Testing language of the utilized programing language | Simple and understandable native language |
| Main Focus | Knowing and understanding requirements | Unit testing | Defining the criteria for acceptance |
| Implementation Level | High-Level | Low-Level | Low-Level |
| Development Stages | Feature discussion, coding, creating scenarios, testing, refactoring | Refactoring, coding | Testing, coding, learning, and feedback |
| Input Documentation | Requirement documentation, acceptance criteria | Requirement documentation | Requirement documentation |
Why BDD is the Better Approach
It applies the “Five Whys” principle to every proposed user story. Thus ensuring that purpose is clearly related to business outcomes.
Defining “From the Outside in” means implementing those behaviors that contribute directly to the business outcomes.
Explains the behaviors in a single notation that is directly accessible to project domain experts, testers, and developers. It ensures efficient collaboration between the team.
Moreover, implementing these techniques all the way down to the lowest levels of abstraction of the software encourages us to pay attention to the distribution of behavior. Consequently, the progression of the project remains cheap.
However, it’s fair to say that Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is quite familiar with the TDD but differs in a way that focuses on the discussion among team members.
Examples of BDD Testing Frameworks
If you ever consider, “what is bdd framework?” It generally depends on some specific requirements of the organization. These frameworks can best support your applications and have a positive impact on how your teams might operate. Here are some of the most common examples of the BDD frameworks:
- Quantum
- Cucumber
- SpecFlow
- Gherkin
- JBehave
Here is a basic breakdown of how these frameworks are likely to work:
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Role Of BDD – Development Cycle
BDD mainly aims to develop code through the interactions between the developers and users with the help of an approach outside-in development. In practical terms, it is an idea to create examples that describe software behavior that the user evaluates.
However, it is crucial to guide software development through the BDD methodology. It is the responsibility of project managers to specify everyone their duties and allow the development of the tool in question.
The mock-ups of the software development plan are also created in this phase to stimulate system modules before writing them. Furthermore, using these tests will help create the opportunity for fast feedback before development.
The Scope Of Behavior-Driven Development
Before running a QA software test, BDD in the project requires the software developer and testers to answer the following detailed questions:
- What is bdd, and where to begin the process?
- What should be a part of the software test, and what should not be tested?
- How often is it required to test?
- What to name the testing process?
- How do you find out the reason for test failure?
In simple words, BDD works on the unit and acceptance testing to avoid several common issues. However, most BDD suggest writing unit test names as complete sentences, starting with the conditional verb, i.e., “Should,” in English.
In addition, it suggests that all the written statements should be in clear business terms and in order of business-related values.
At the same time, the user story in BDD software development and testing projects is an informal way of using natural language to describe the specifications of the software system. These software specifications are described from an end-user view and are documented in the project’s index cards.
Moreover, some teams use BDD frameworks for collaboration and communication between the software developers, the QA team, and business or nontechnical participants in the development project.
For better elaboration, here is an example:
Benefits Of BDD Automation
Following are the reasons why most software development teams choose BDD as their preferred testing methodology.
1- Excellent Results
Through the BDD approach, developers have resulted in software design that syncs with the exact business owner’s requirements, leading to suitable solutions.
2- Flexibility
BDD in software development projects allows excellent flexibility in new design integrations. Also, it makes the software architecture simpler and easier to manage. It makes the system so flexible that you can quickly adjust to new requirements without disturbing the proprietary stability and work balance.
3- Efficient Collaboration
The majority of the project development teams adopt BDD for efficient communication throughout the project. Excellent communication between the team makes feedback and tracking updates simple.
4- User Satisfaction
To improve business appraisal and help to gather more customers requires BDD to software satisfy user’s needs. Moreover, user-focused development boosts customer loyalty and is necessary for brand reputation.
5- Deep Understanding
BDD ensures that both tech-oriented and nontechnical team members also have insight into the project’s progression. To a great extent, common language makes it possible to involve everyone.
6- A Living Documentation
BDD is a real example of an all-time usable description of the current system behavior. The results drawn from the system are the most accessible project guidelines for the developers involved. Furthermore, it validates the system before regulatory or third-party changes.
7- Instant Iterations
BDD makes it easier for the team to work in rapid repetitions. At the same time, allowing the team to continuously break down users’ problems into several elements for fast development.
Principles Of BDD:
Here are some of the basic principles of BDD (behavior-driven development):
Enough Is Enough
The principles of BDD enough is enough, include advanced planning, analysis, and design that have diminishing returns. We must not do less than what is essential to start but put more than that when it’s time to finish.
Delivering Value To “Stakeholders”
For instance, if any team member is doing something that does not deliver value or increases your skills or ability to deliver outcomes. Then that specific member should quit that and do something different.
Everything Is Behavior
Either at the level of code application or about testing and beyond, the team should use the same ideas and language to describe the behavior at any level.
These principles are broken down into three main things, which are:
Warping Up:
At the end of the day, BDD (Behavior Driven Development) is about streamlining the entire software development process and delivering the required results. And the answer to what is BDD? It is not only a mere toolset, but it is a mindset.
BDD teaches business analysts, testers, and developers effective ways to discover the requirements. Moreover, it can also help the developers to write higher quality code and ensure maintenance.
However, one thing you need to remember is that when dealing with BDD, follow only the best practices. This will undoubtedly allow you to enhance your expertise in this intelligent, agile software development methodology approach.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is BDD using Cucumber?
A cucumber is basically a test automation tool based on the BDD framework. It is basically utilized to write tests for the web application using the Ruby programming language. It converts automation into a more functional and understandable format.
Should we use BDD for API testing?
Yes, it is often a good approach for BDD scenarios to use APIs to complete their work. However, the primary focus is not on API testing in many situations.
